Noccioleta:
Osteria di Pian dei Mucini

A simple osteria with decent but not outstanding food, with a literary plus.

Directions: Arriving from Siena on SS441, right at the intersection with the road to Volterra. It is the only building and it has a big yellow sign, so you can't miss it.

Osteria di Pian dei Mucini is not a high profile restaurant. It offers decent food for cheap prices. What took Luca and me there is not the food itself, it is the fact that the osteria is also the base of Fondo Boccardi (www.fondoboccardi.it), a literary foundation that celebrates the writer Daniele Boccardi, who in the early 1990s' celebrated Maremma and its people. Once or twice a month there is a dinner with a writer, when authors talk about their works while enjoying traditional Maremma foods, and sometimes more exotic ones (15 euro for each person). In one corner, a bookshelf is filled by the books sponsored by Fondazione Boccardi, the guests of the restaurant are welcome to read them as they wait for their meal to arrive.

The osteria has a first room that serves as a bar and where passers by may also have a panino with a selection of local cured meats or cheeses and buy a few preserves, and a restaurant room that can sit some 20 people, furnished with the staples of blue collar Italian restaurants, including the six people tables divided in two parts with a wooden slate.

Yet the food was not bad at all. As first course we had tortelli filled with ricotta and spinach and garnished with a ragł sauce with meat and mushrooms (it may have improved a bit by cooking a little longer, but it was tasty). As second course I had fagioli dell'oste: basically fagioli all'uccelletta with a few mushrooms, while Luca had a nice boar with olives. One liter of water, half a liter of house wine (served in a old-style half liter osteria bottle) and a coffee made the meal complete. We spent 32 euro.

This review is the opinion of a Slow Travel member and not of slowtrav.com.